Saturday, January 2, 2010

Alam Vs. Hoodbhoy: A Clash of Ideas in Islam

There is a lot of talk about the "clash of civilizations" in the Western media in the context of the US "war on terror", but little is reported about the fierce clash of ideas going on within the Islamic civilization. The polls continue to show distrust of the United States in the Islamic World, mostly based on the US policies that are perceived as unjust by the majority of the world's Muslims. The list of Muslim grievances against the United States is long, stretching from its support of the brutal Israeli occupation of Palestine to its role in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. In addition to the increasing drone attacks and rising suspicions about the role of the CIA, there are new and explosive revelations about the role and the strength of Blackwater contractors in the region. A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine have alleged that Blackwater chief Erik Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life." The number of US contractors working for the US military and the CIA in the region exceeds the total strength of the US troops and CIA personnel, according to estimates by Jimmy Scahill who has researched and written extensively about Blackwater. The presence of over 80,000 US military and intelligence contractors in Afghanistan and Pakistan makes the level of privatization of war unprecedented.

However, it would be wrong to conclude from such reports that any more than a tiny minority of the followers of the Islamic faith support the terrorists inspired by al Qaeda's ideology of hate. In a recent International Republican Institute (IRI) poll, eighty percent of Pakistanis oppose Pakistan's cooperation with the United States on the "war on terror," a figure that shot up 19 points since March. At the same time, 86 percent agreed that Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants posed a problem for Pakistan and more than two-thirds supported a recent Pakistani army offensive on extremists.

To get a sense of the intensity of the debate raging among influential Muslim scholars and opinion makers, I think it is quite instructive to read the recent exchange between Dr. Shahid Alam and Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy. Accusing Dr. Hoodbhoy and several others by name of being "native orientalists", Dr. Alam begins his recent Counterpunch article with a quote from Karl Marx, a strange choice giving Dr. Alam's well-established right-wing credentials. Here is the Karl Marx quote: "The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the foremost minds of the ruled class, the more stable and dangerous becomes its rule”.

Dr. Hoodbhoy of Islamabad University begins his response with the following quote from "The Confessions of a Pakistani Native Orientalist" written by Dr. Shahid Alam, a professor of Pakistani origin who teaches at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts:

"The victory of Native Orientalists - the ones which the late Edward Said had warned us about - is nearly complete in Pakistan. It has been led by "the minions of Western embassies and Western-financed NGOs and includes the likes of "Ahmad Rashid, Pervez Hoodbhoy, Najam Sethi, Khaled Ahmad, Irfan Hussain, Husain Haqqani, and P.J.Mir".

In his response to Alam, Hoodbhoy takes umbrage with the invocation by Dr. Alam of the name of Edward Said, who "was my mentor and hero, the man who wrote a highly positive blurb displayed prominently on the backside of my book on Islam and science". Hoodbhoy goes on to recount the unspeakable horrors and daily atrocities committed by the Taliban in Pakistan, and takes Alam to task for his adulation of the perpetrators of such inhuman acts as "the sons and daughters of the mountains, yet uncontaminated by western civilisation, firm in their faith, clear in their conviction, proud of their heritage, and ready to fight for their dignity".

Here is the full text of Dr. Hoodbhoy's response:

I ought to be thrilled. Now that I am a certified foreign-funded agent/orientalist/NGO-operator who "manages US-Zionist interests", a nice fat cheque must surely be in the mail. Thirty six years of teaching and social activism at a public university in Pakistan - where salaries are less than spectacular - means that additions to one's bank balance are always welcome.

But what did I do to deserve this kindness? My sole interaction with the good professor was in mid-2008, when we shared the speaker's podium at the International Islamic University in Islamabad. Sadly, it was not terribly pleasant.

But then these are not pleasant times. There is carnage in the streets. Blood flows down the gutters and body parts are strewn in bazaars and markets. Suicide bombers have also targeted mosques, funerals, and hospitals. The internet is filled with videos of Pakistan army soldiers being decapitated, pictures of separated heaps of limbs and heads of Shiites, and women writhing under the blows of heavy whips and chains.

The Taliban, mostly from the mountains of Waziristan and other tribal areas of Pakistan, are not particularly shy to broadcast such achievements. For example, their decapitation movies - culminating in heads being stuck upon poles and paraded around town - are watched for free by kids. On 15 February 2009, the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan announced a ban on all female education and, at last count, 362 schools have been blown up in Pakistan's tribal areas.

Curiously, these very people also happen to be the heroes of Professor Alam. This self-described "anti-imperialist" and "anti-Zionist" migrant to the heart of imperialism tends to become breathless in his celebration of the brave Taliban "resistance fighters". At the meeting I mentioned above, he received ecstatic approbation from a leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami, Khurshid Ahmad, who chaired the meeting. This praise is also apparent in what the professor writes:

"Yet, in one corner of Pakistan, resistance comes from the sons and daughters of the mountains, yet uncontaminated by western civilisation, firm in their faith, clear in their conviction, proud of their heritage, and ready to fight for their dignity. They stood up against the Soviet marauders: and defeated them. Today, they are standing up again, now against the American marauders and their allies." [Pakistan's Mercenary Elites, by M. Shahid Alam]

Unless the professor is physically infirm, may I suggest that he head for the mountains of Waziristan to help the Pakistani Taliban movement? Or give a helping hand to Al-Qaida, an organization also known for its benevolence? To be sure, he may miss the free lunches the American taxpayer provides to him, but surely there must be satisfaction to be had in strapping a madrassa lad with explosives aimed at a Pakistani bazaar - especially one frequented by unveiled women and brides-to-be.

Politeness aside, I do take serious personal offence on just one matter in his outbursts against the opponents of Al-Qaida and the Taliban. This is when the good professor invokes the name and authority of Edward Said, author of "Orientalism", in condemning me and my colleagues in Pakistan.

Edward was my mentor and hero, the man who wrote a highly positive blurb displayed prominently on the backside of my book on Islam and science. He was also the closest friend of Eqbal Ahmad - my guru and dearest friend. With Eqbal, many were the pleasant evenings that we spent at Edward's apartment on Riverside Drive, New York. When Eqbal died, Edward and I were both lost in grief. When Edward died in 2003, I defended him against a poisonous article published the next day in the Wall Street Journal by a notorious Islamophobe, Ibn Warraq.

So cut it out, professor! Edward Said does not belong to the jihadists and their declared supporters - like you. He and Eqbal loathed their primitivism and utter ruthlessness, as well as their desecration of Islam. Please do not press him into your service.

On the contrary, Edward belongs to those of us on the Left who have worked for the Palestinians and their right to the lands on which they once lived, who keep fighting for justice and democracy in Pakistan, and who fervently opposed America's immoral invasion of Iraq in the streets of Islamabad and elsewhere. Edward was a supreme secular humanist who would have no truck with fanatics of any faith.

I do not know all the "native orientalists" and "brown sahibs" that the professor lists. Perhaps he secretly hopes that they shall receive appropriate attention from jihadist groups. But I do know some of these "traitors" - and they are among the finest people around. A couple, in their youth, had fought against the Pakistan Army in the mountains of Baluchistan. Others have stoutly defended religious minorities and worked to protect civil rights, democracy, and human values.

Professor Alam: be assured that once the expected cheque arrives, I shall be happy to send you a one-way ticket from Boston to Peshawar, from where you will easily find your way to Waziristan with help from your friends there. It shall be no less than business class, in appreciation of the services you render to your cause.


Here's a documentary on Islam narrated by Benazir Bhutto:



Related Links:

Is Pakistan Becoming Saudi Arabia?

Native Orientalists at the Daily Times by Dr. Shahid Alam

Pervez Hoodbhoy on Mumbai

The Prophet I Know!

Pakistanis See US as Biggest Threat

International Republican Institute Poll of Pakistanis

Israeli War Crimes in Gaza

America's Secret War in Pakistan

Pakistan's Mercenary Elite By Dr. Shahid Alam

Hoodbhoy Versus Atau-ur-Rahman on Higher Education Reform

Hoodbhoy on Kashmir

Is There an Islamic Problem? by Shahid Alam

Marching Toward Hell by Michael Scheuer

Hoodbhoy on India

32 comments:

Zen, Munich, Germany said...

@Riaz

So where is Muslim Martin Luther King? The lack of a Muslim Pope may mean that he will never appear. Tariq Ramadan, a person who has been touted as one is too weak or even dishonest in my opinion.
See http://dir.salon.com/story/people/feature/2002/02/15/ramadan/
As a matter of fact, Islam badly needs a reform when it comes to some things such as gender equality and non violent ways to resolve political problems(although Islam's deficiency in gender equality when compared to some other oriental cultures is grossly exaggerated by Western media because of inherent prejudices). What is deplorable is the spirit of introspection is grossly missing from contemperory Islamic popular thinking in subcontinent.

Riaz Haq said...

Zen: "So where is Muslim Martin Luther King? "

I think Martin Luther King was the product a unique set of conditions and history of the Black people in the United States. And he was seen by American white establishment as an acceptable alternative to what Malcom X and Elijah Mohammad/Louis Farrakhan preached. But let's not forget that he was a harsh critic of what he described as America's "militarism", "racism" and "imperialism", who also spoke of non-violent methods to gain basic civil rights for his people.

In spite of the concept of one Ummah, the reality is that Muslims in the world are much more diverse and their practice of Islam is heavily influenced by local history, cultures and conditions in each geography. So what we might get eventually may be several versions of Martin Luther King in different parts of the Islamic work...an Arab MLK, a South Asian MLK, an South East Asian MLK etc.

But I agree that we are in serious need of reform for a renaissance and revival within Islam that allows us to peacefully co-exist with the major non-Muslim nation-states in the world.

Zen: "As a matter of fact, Islam badly needs a reform when it comes to some things such as gender equality.."

In spite of the grim picture painted by many, the status of women in Pakistan, and the rest of South Asia, continues to vary considerably across different classes, regions, and the rural/urban divide due to uneven socioeconomic development and the impact of tribal, feudal, and urban social customs on women's lives. While some women are soaring in the skies as pilots of passenger jets and supersonic fighter planes, others are being buried or burned alive for defying traditions. Girls account for 53% of all college students in Pakistan, according to the 2005 Education Census.

I think more education and increasing urbanization in Pakistan will help cure of many of the gender gap issues in Pakistan and other parts of the world.

Zen, Munich, Germany said...

@Riaz

Correction: I meant Martin Luther, father of Protestentanism rather than MLK. Salon was also comparing Tariq R. to former.

Anonymous said...

Riaz,

Tiny minority support terrorism??

At one time Pakistani support for Osama Bin Laden was more than 50%.

http://blogs.reuters.com/pakistan/2008/09/19/us-bin-laden-losing-support-in-pakistan-pew-report/

http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=262

Riaz Haq said...

Zen: "I meant Martin Luther, father of Protestentanism rather than MLK. Salon was also comparing Tariq R. to former."

As you rightly pointed out earlier, the Sunni Islam, the predominant sect among Muslims, has no concept of anything like the pope or the imam. Sunni Islam can more easily lend itself to reform. But I think life under colonialism (and now neo-colonial powers) has rendered Muslims too bitter to overcome their deep-seated negative emotions that are consuming them.

Colonization of the East also coincided with the industrial revolution which was denied to the Muslim nations, hence ensuring their backwardness.

Indonesians and Malaysians have done relatively well in spite of their colonial past, probably because of their distance from the Middle East.

The Turks have also done better than other Muslim nations because they were never colonized. The Afghans, too, were never directly colonized, but they have never abandoned their tribal culture and roots.

Anonymous said...

here is another example of what is wrong with pakistan. Just ignore monumental failure which pak is and exaggerate India's failure as if that automatically proves pak as a success.
http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/Opinions/Columns/05-Jan-2010/Not-so-Shining-India

Riaz Haq said...

Here's a story about Helen Thomas' persistence in seeking answers on the core question as to "why do they want to harm us?"

After Obama briefly addressed L'Affaire Abdulmutallab and wrote "must do better" on the report cards of the national security schoolboys responsible for the near catastrophe, the President turned the stage over to counter-terrorism guru John Brennan and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

It took 89-year old veteran correspondent Helen Thomas to break through the vapid remarks about channeling "intelligence streams," fixing "no-fly" lists, deploying "behavior detection officers," and buying more body-imaging scanners.

Thomas recognized the John & Janet filibuster for what it was, as her catatonic press colleagues took their customary dictation and asked their predictable questions. Instead, Thomas posed an adult query that spotlighted the futility of government plans to counter terrorism with more high-tech gizmos and more intrusions on the liberties and privacy of the traveling public.

She asked why Abdulmutallab did what he did.

Thomas: "Why do they want to do us harm? And what is the motivation? We never hear what you find out on why."

Brennan: "Al Qaeda is an organization that is dedicated to murder and wanton slaughter of innocents... They attract individuals like Mr. Abdulmutallab and use them for these types of attacks. He was motivated by a sense of religious sort of drive. Unfortunately, al Qaeda has perverted Islam, and has corrupted the concept of Islam, so that he's (sic) able to attract these individuals. But al Qaeda has the agenda of destruction and death."

Thomas: "And you're saying it's because of religion?"

Brennan: "I'm saying it's because of an al Qaeda organization that used the banner of religion in a very perverse and corrupt way."

Thomas: "Why?"

Brennan: "I think this is a - long issue, but al Qaeda is just determined to carry out attacks here against the homeland."

Thomas: "But you haven't explained why."

Neither did President Obama, nor anyone else in the U.S. political/media hierarchy. All the American public gets is the boilerplate about how evil al Qaeda continues to pervert a religion and entice and exploit impressionable young men.

There is almost no discussion about why so many people in the Muslim world object to U.S. policies so strongly that they are inclined to resist violently and even resort to suicide attacks.

Yousuf said...

http://ziauddinsardar.com/articles.htm


THUMBNAIL BIO:

Ziauddin Sardar (born October 31, 1951 in northern Pakistan) is a London-based Muslim scholar, critic, futurist, journalist and a prolific writer. Considered a pioneering thinker on contemporary Islam, he has been described by the Independent newspaper as ‘Britain’s own polymath’ [1]. His intellectual output, published in some 45 books, ranges from the future of Islam to critiques of postmodernism, science policy, contemporary aspects of science in Muslim societies, colonialism, cultural relations, literary criticism, travel and autobiography. He was worked as a science correspondent for Nature and New Scientist and in the early 1980’s he became a television reporter for the London Weekend Television. He has made numerous television programmes, including Battle for Islam, a 90-minute documentary for BBC2 and Dispatches for Channel 4 on Pakistan. In 1999, he became the editor of Futures, the monthly journal of policy, planning and future studies. He co-edited edited Third Text, the critical journal of visual art and culture, from to 1999 to 2008. In 2006 he was appointed a Commissioner of the Equality and Human Rights Commission of Britain.

Currently he is a visiting Professor of Postcolonial Studies, Department of Arts Policy and Management at City University, London and a contributing editor of New Statesman. He received an Honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of East London in 2005.

Citations:

"There is a two-word answer to the charge that Muslims who remain serious about faith have failed to engage with the science, culture and politics of the contemporary world. The words are Ziauddin Sardar."
-The Independent

"One of the finest intellectuals on the planet."
- The Herald

"A remarkable author."
- Nature

Riaz Haq said...

Here's an ABC News report about US military weapons in Iraq:

Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the U.S. military by a Michigan company, an ABC News investigation has found.

The sights are used by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the training of Iraqi and Afghan soldiers. The maker of the sights, Trijicon, has a $660 million multi-year contract to provide up to 800,000 sights to the Marine Corps, and additional contracts to provide sights to the U.S. Army.

U.S. military rules specifically prohibit the proselytizing of any religion in Iraq or Afghanistan and were drawn up in order to prevent criticism that the U.S. was embarked on a religious "Crusade" in its war against al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents.
Related

One of the citations on the gun sights, 2COR4:6, is an apparent reference to Second Corinthians 4:6 of the New Testament, which reads: "For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."

Other references include citations from the books of Revelation, Matthew and John dealing with Jesus as "the light of the world." John 8:12, referred to on the gun sights as JN8:12, reads, "Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life."

Trijicon confirmed to ABCNews.com that it adds the biblical codes to the sights sold to the U.S. military. Tom Munson, director of sales and marketing for Trijicon, which is based in Wixom, Michigan, said the inscriptions "have always been there" and said there was nothing wrong or illegal with adding them. Munson said the issue was being raised by a group that is "not Christian." The company has said the practice began under its founder, Glyn Bindon, a devout Christian from South Africa who was killed in a 2003 plane crash.

Riaz Haq said...

Here are some excerpts from NY Times about sufi Islam celebration in Lahore:

LAHORE, Pakistan — For those who think Pakistan is all hard-liners, all the time, three activities at an annual festival here may come as a surprise.

Thousands of Muslim worshipers paid tribute to the patron saint of this eastern Pakistani city this month by dancing, drumming and smoking pot.

It is not an image one ordinarily associates with Pakistan, a country whose tormented western border region dominates the news. But it is an important part of how Islam is practiced here, a tradition that goes back a thousand years to Islam’s roots in South Asia.

It is Sufism, a mystical form of Islam brought into South Asia by wandering thinkers who spread the religion east from the Arabian Peninsula. They carried a message of equality that was deeply appealing to indigenous societies riven by caste and poverty. To this day, Sufi shrines stand out in Islam for allowing women free access.

In modern times, Pakistan’s Sufis have been challenged by a stricter form of Islam that dominates in Saudi Arabia. That orthodox, often political Islam was encouraged in Pakistan in the 1980s by the American-supported dictator, Muhammad Zia ul-Haq. Since then, the fundamentalists’ aggressive stance has tended to eclipse that of their moderate kin, whose shrines and processions have become targets in the war here.

But if last week’s stomping, twirling, singing, drumming kaleidoscope of a crowd is any indication, Sufism still has a powerful appeal.

“There are bomb blasts all around, but people don’t stay away,” said a 36-year-old bank teller named Najibullah. “When the celebration comes, people have to dance.”

Worshipers had come from all over Pakistan to commemorate the death of the saint, Ali bin Usman al-Hajveri, an 11th-century mystic. Known here today as Data Ganj Baksh, or Giver of Treasures, the Persian-speaking mystic journeyed to Lahore with Central Asian invaders, according to Raza Ahmed Rumi, a Pakistani writer and expert on Sufism. He settled outside the city, a stopover on the trade route to Delhi, started a meditation center and wrote a manual on Sufi practices, Mr. Rumi said.

Riaz Haq said...

Here is Tariq Ramadan writing about his travel ban and subsequent lifting of the ban by the US in Newsweek:

It was hardly a fight I had expected. Less than a year earlier, the State Department had invited me to speak in Washington, D.C., and introduced me as a "moderate" Muslim intellectual who denounced terrorism and attacks against civilians. Now it was banning me from U.S. soil under a provision of the Patriot Act that allows for "ideological exclusions." My offense, it seemed, had been to forcefully criticize America's support for Israel and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. accused me of endorsing terrorism through my words and funding it through donations to a Swiss charity with alleged ties to Gaza. Civil-liberties groups challenged my case in court for almost six years until, in late January, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dropped the allegations against me, effectively ending my ban.

In early April I will make my first public appearance in the U.S., at New York City's Cooper Union, participating in a panel discussion about Muslims. While it's a victory of sorts, the fight is not over. Numerous foreign scholars remain banned from U.S. soil. Until the section of the Patriot Act that kept me out of the country is lifted, more people will suffer the same fate. Although the exclusions are carried out in the name of security and stability, they actually threaten both by closing off the open, critical, and constructive dialogue that once defined this country.

In my case, criticizing America's Middle East policies cast doubt on my loyalty to Western values and cost me a job. But prejudice may ultimately cost the U.S. more. By creating divisions and disregarding its values, even in the name of security, America tells the world that it is frightened and unstable—above all, vulnerable. In the long term, it also reinforces the religious, cultural, and social isolation of minority groups, encouraging the very kind of disloyalty that these ideological exclusions are meant to prevent.

It's not the first time America has tried to shield itself from dissenting opinions. During the Cold War, dozens of overseas artists, activists, and intellectuals—including British novelist Doris Lessing, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, and Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez—were denied visas because of their left-leaning ideas. Today, though, the American concept of the "other" has taken on a relatively new and specific form: the Muslim. America must face the reality that, in the West, many adherents to Islam demonstrate loyalty to democratic values through criticism. While violence must always be condemned, such debate must be encouraged if those values are to last.

Riaz Haq said...

There is no question that disunity exists among Muslims and it is exploited by non-Muslims, as well as some opportunistic Muslims such as the puppet rulers in the Islamic world.

It's true for now and has been true throughout history.

But if the current tragic disunity, which is claiming more lives than ever, leads us to reform from within, it will not be a wasted opportunity. As they say, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

Today, I see some signs of serious intellectual discourse among Muslims in Pakistan.

Like Hassan Al Banna and Syed Qutb before him, Maulana Maudoodi was a foremost intellect, an influential thought leader, and a great scholar of Islam in the 20th century. He has influenced a lot of the contemporary thought among Muslims in the Middle East and South Asia. Two of his disciples, Javed Ghamidi and Israr Ahmed, each an intellectual in his own right, have evolved in very different directions.

A faction within Maulana Maududi’s Jamaat-e-Islami broke away under the leadership of Maulana Amin Ahsan Islahi whose school of thought was then carried forward by Khalid Masud and Javed Ahmed Ghamidi. Javed Ahmed Ghamidi today is probably the most liberal and progressive scholar in the entire Islamic world. This Islamic scholar has come a full circle by claiming that Islamic state is not an objective of a Muslim but rather the objective of a Muslim is individual reform. Contrast this to another breakaway Jamaat faction - Dr. Israr Ahmed- whose Tanzeem-e-Islami is a religious movement working towards “Non-violent attainment of Khilafah”.

Riaz Haq said...

Here's an Economist report on the battle for control of IslamOnline website:

IslamOnline’s mostly Egyptian staff has been wrestling for control of the website with its Qatari owner, the al-Balagh Cultural Society, which is based in Doha, Qatar’s capital, and wants to cut jobs in Cairo and move some of its editorial offices back home. The Cairo staff claim that this is a ploy to take the website in a more conservative direction. The managers in Doha counter that IslamOnline has become too parochially Egyptian and has been straying from its mission to reach out to all Muslims.

But this labour dispute also reflects an Arab cold war that pits Egypt against more radical states. Qatari-owned media such as al-Jazeera and IslamOnline have relentlessly criticised Egypt in recent years, notably for its complicity in Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Some suspect that toning down IslamOnline’s news coverage by reining in its staff, some of whom are close to the Muslim Brothers, who in turn are close to the Islamist Hamas movement that controls Gaza, is a Qatari gesture to Egypt’s government. Others point to longstanding rivalry between Saudis and Qataris, who, it is mooted, may be eager to reduce the influence of a Saudi company that has been helping to run the Cairo website.

IslamOnline began in 1997 as a student project at the University of Qatar with cash from Sheikha Mozah, an enterprising wife of Qatar’s emir, and with an endorsement from the prominent and sometimes controversial Egyptian-born scholar, Yusuf al-Qaradawi. At IslamOnline’s launch, speaking on his extremely popular al-Jazeera religious talk-show, “Sharia and Life”, Mr Qaradawi said its mission to guide Muslims is “the jihad of our era.”

On the whole, this jihad has been a soft one. IslamOnline has to some extent been a lifestyle publication, focusing on how to mix modern life and religion. It offers religious advice without fire and brimstone, tackling sensitive topics such as sexuality conservatively but straightforwardly. Bettina Graf, who writes about the media in the Muslim world, calls it “moralist-conservative and missionary, though not dogmatic.” But it was also, in the words of Khaled Hamza, a reform-minded Muslim Brother, a place were “great intellectual battles” were waged over the future of Islamism, mostly influenced by Mr Qaradawi’s wasatiyyah (centrist) current.

Mr Qaradawi, 84, is sometimes said to be the most influential living Sunni Muslim scholar. He has stirred controversy in the West for endorsing suicide bombings in certain circumstances and for his homophobic views, and has been banned from Britain and the United States. For siding with his Egyptian compatriots against the Qatari management, he has lost his chairmanship of al-Balagh. Some see this as a fall from grace, and wonder if Qatar, which has hosted him for most of his adult life, will now freeze him out. His ideas, notably for tackling Sunni angst over the erosion of traditional religious authority and his attempt to counter millennial strands of Islamism with a conservative reformism, may have lost a resounding voice if he is now kept off IslamOnline.

Riaz Haq said...

Here are some excepts from Sherbano Taseer (Salman Taseer's daughter) interview with Pakistani Islamic scholar Javaid Ahmed Ghamidi as published in Newsweek Pakistan:

Are Islam and democracy compatible?

Yes, of course. Islam favors democratic societies. In the West, they have created democracies, which may have their shortcomings, but where people listen to one another, tolerate each other's opinions, and engage in dialogue. The majority opinion is made into law, and these laws can be criticized, debated freely, and amended based on people's beliefs.

There is furor in Pakistan over the blasphemy laws. What does the Quran say about punishing those who are proven to have committed blasphemy?

There is no punishment prescribed for blasphemy in the Quran or in the sayings of the Holy Prophet (peace be upon him). Some clerics cite the case of Ibn Akhtar, but they misinterpret that incident and make it about blasphemy. Man can make laws, and these should not be misused to unfairly target or victimize anyone. Islam specifically says that taking the life of an individual is tantamount to taking the life of all humanity. It is a crime. It is wrong. Allah says true Muslims are those in whose hands others are safe.
---
Do you feel Pakistan can contain the extremist threat?

Let's start by not losing hope. We can contain it if we unite. There needs to be a new movement, by educated people, who can put pressure on the government so that, for one, education returns to being the responsibility of the state. Otherwise, this cancer of extremism will continue to spread. Pakistan has over 12,000 madrassahs with more than 2 million students. The countless clerics at these schools have immense sway, they have formed communities around themselves and they have weapons. And when power comes into the hands of such people—when we give them that power—you get what we have happening right now. There is nothing in the Quran or the Prophet's (peace be upon him) sayings to justify what the extremists are doing. We need to enter the playing field and correct this, and turn their arguments on their head. I have challenged them on every occasion for the past five years or so, and told them what they are saying is incorrect. They can only stay silent in return. Even in the matter of blasphemy they could not refute me, but I feel I am alone in this.
--------
So how do we change things?

People need to understand Islam themselves, there is no other way. We need to understand the religion and launch a movement to reform society. In the West, there was a reformation movement which needs to be replicated in the East. There is strength in our arguments. You can reason with these people if you reason strongly and with facts. Islam was initially spread by a handful of people. This is how you will get success and nobody will be able to refute it. The media has a lot of power and must use this power positively, spreading the message from house to house. But the reality is that we are not ready to take up this cause. The secularists and the elite are not ready to take this up, they are not ready to talk and engage especially about beliefs.

What role do you see religious scholars playing to improve our society?

They, like doctors and engineers, are experts in their field. Their role is not to pick up guns, but to argue with facts and to present their arguments logically and calmly. Their role is not to threaten or to preach in a hostile or forceful manner in the streets, but to inform and show people the right Islam. The unfortunate reality here is that those who claim to be adherents of Allah's word are actually quite unfamiliar with the faith.

Riaz Haq said...

Here are some excerpts from an interesting post by Prof Juan Cole of Univ of Michigan on what he calls "hand-wringing about religious extremism in Pakistan".

There has been a lot of hand-wringing about religious extremism in Pakistan in the wake of the assassination of Punjab governor Salman Taseer. On Sunday the fundamentalist religious parties held a rally some 40,000 strong in the southern port city of Karachi against repealing Pakistan’s blasphemy law, as the Pakistan People’s Party MP Sherry Rahman proposes.

It would be foolish to deny that Pakistan has a problem with religious extremism. But outsiders do not actually understand the country very well and have no sense of scale, so it is hard for them to judge the significance of these events. Here I want to offer five ironies of religious extremism in that country, in an attempt to signal that the story is more complicated and requires more nuance than you find at typical American anti-Muslim hate blogs. Let me just signal the important difference between religious traditionalism and religious fundamentalism. Many Pakistanis are traditionalists– they attend at saints’ shrines, pray, sing religious songs (qawali), etc. Fundamentalists reject the idea of saints, of shrines, and of spiritual music. So on to the ironies:

1. The Pakistani parliament never passed a blasphemy law. It was promulgated in the 1980s by fiat by military dictator Gen. Zia ul-Haq. Gen. Zia made a coup in 1977 against the populist and left-leaning Pakistan People’s Party, and received the warm support of the United States, especially after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Gen. Zia was a fundamentalist who sought support in civil society for his illegitimate regime among small fundamentalist parties such as the Jama’at al-Islami. The US raised no objections.

2. The murderer of Taseer, Mumtaz Qadri, is not a fundamentalist. He had a long affair with a lover in Karachi before marrying about a year ago. He is no puritan. He sometimes trimmed back his beard, something Pakistani religious conservatives usually avoid. He sometimes went to saints’ shrines, which fundamentalists would denounce. He has no connection to any known terrorist group, and says he acted alone. He belongs to a moderate school of Islam. Many press reports have said that Taseer’s murder points to the rise of Pakistani fundamentalism, but you could not prove it by Qadri’s profile. He seems to represent no one but himself.

3. The rally of 40,000 in favor of the blasphemy law just isn’t that big in Karachi, a city of over 15 million people. The 9/11 Commission estimated that there are some 200,000 students in the religious academies or madrasahs in Karachi, so the rally did not even attract very many of them, much less a significant number of the religiously committed persons in the megalopolis.

4. The people of Karachi vote for the militantly secular if rather thuggish MQM (Muttahidah Qaumi Movement) party, which runs their municipal government and represents them in the national parliament. The MQM vehemently denounced the killing of Taseer. Fundamentalists are not important in Karachi politics, except insofar as they are violent infiltrators....

Riaz Haq said...

Here's an interesting Op Ed by Leonard Pitts published in the Miami Herald:

OK, put your books away. We’re having a pop quiz.

Below are four quotes. Each is from one of two sources: the Bible or the Koran, although, just to make things interesting, there’s also a chance all four are from one book. Two were edited for length and one of those was also edited to remove a religion-specific reference. Your job: identify the holy book of origin. Ready? Go:

1) “. . . Wherever you encounter [non-believers], kill them, seize them, besiege them, wait for them at every lookout post . . .”

2) “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

3) “If your very own brother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you love, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying, ‘Let us go and worship other gods’ . . . do not yield to him or listen to him. Show him no pity. Do not spare him or shield him. You must certainly put him to death.”

4) “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.”

All right, pens down. How did you do?

If you identified the first quote as being from the Koran (9:5) and the other three as originating in the Bible (Matthew 10:34, Deuteronomy 13:6-9, Numbers 31:17-18), I congratulate you on that degree in theology. If I have guessed correctly, most people will not have found it easy to place the quotes in their proper books. If I have guessed correctly, most people will have found a certain thematic similarity in them.

Yes, there is a point here: I wish people would stop cherry-picking warlike quotes from the Koran to “prove” the evil of Islam. You see this stuff all over the web. Just a few days ago, some anonymous person, angry with me for defending “Fascist/Nazi Islam” the writer says is trying to kill us all, sent me an e-mail quoting Koranic exhortations to violence to prove that Islam is a “religion of hate and murder.”

As rhetorical devices go, it is a cheap parlor trick, a con job to fool the foolish and gull the gullible and for anyone who has spent quality time with the Bible, its shortcomings should be obvious.

If not, see the pop quiz again. The Koran is hardly unique in its admonitions to take up the sword.

It is not my intention here to parse any of those troubling quotes. Let us leave it to religious scholars to contextualize them, to explain how they square with the contention that Islam and Christianity are religions of peace. For our purposes, it is sufficient to note that, while both Christian and Muslim scholars will offer that context and explanation, only Christians can be assured of being taken at their word when they do.

Christians get the benefit of the doubt. Muslims get Glenn Beck asking a Muslim Congressman to “prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.”

Because Christianity is regarded as a known — and a norm. Muslims, meantime, have been drafted since Sept. 11, 2001, to fulfill the nation’s obsessive, historic, paranoiac and ongoing need to rally against an enemy within. We lost the Commies, but along came the Islamo-fascists. The names change. The endless capacity for irrational panic remains the same.

As in people who send out e-mails insisting upon the rightness of holding over a billion people — that bears repeating: over a billion people — responsible for the actions of, what . . .? A few hundred? A few thousand?

Some of us use lies, exaggerations and rhetorical gobbledygook to instill in the rest of us that irrational panic they breathe like air. Yes, it is only sensible to fear the threat we face from terrorism. But panicked, irrational people are capable of anything.

Might be wise if we chose to fear that, too.

Riaz Haq said...

It appears that the Norwegian white supremacist terrorist Breivik shared the thinking of Nazi-loving Hindu Nationalists like Golwalkar and his Sangh Parivar buddies. Here's an excerpt from a Express Tribune story:

"While Breivik’s rhetoric against Muslim immigration into Europe is not unusual, he cites many names that might be familiar to Pakistanis, including Allama Muhammad Iqbal and Maulana Abul Ala Maududi, as well as prominent human rights activist Hina Jilani and Dawn columnist Irfan Hussain.
He seems to believe that Iqbal, in particular, was sympathetic to communism and views multiculturalism as a Marxist concept. He quotes Iqbal as saying “Islam equals communism plus Allah.”
Breivik also claims that Pakistan is systematically annihilating all non-Muslim communities. He claimed that Hindu girls are being forced to convert to Islam in Sindh. In this context he even quotes Hina Jilani as saying: “Have you ever heard of an Indian Muslim girl being forced to embrace Hinduism? It’s Muslims winning by intimidation.”
He goes on to describe the situation for Christians in Pakistan as being no better, citing Father Emmanuel Asi of the Theological Institute for Laity in Lahore as saying in 2007 that Pakistani Christians are frequently denied equal rights.
Jamaat-e-Islami founder Abul Ala Maududi is also quoted in the manifesto, though in a manner that would imply that the stated objective of an Islamic state is to kill or subdue all non-Muslims around the world.
Breivik seems to be a fan of Daily Times columnist Razi Azmi, whom he calls “one of the more sensible columnists of Pakistan”. He mentions one of Azmi’s pieces where the columnist asks whether it was possible to imagine a Muslim converting to Christianity or Hinduism or Buddhism in a Muslim country, using it to support his view of Islam as an intolerant religion.
He also cites Dawn’s Irfan Hussain’s column criticising Hizb u-Tahrir’s vision of a caliphate.
His ire against Pakistanis and Muslims seems to have at least partial origin in personal experience. He speaks at length about his childhood best friend, a Pakistani Muslim immigrant to Norway who, despite having lived several years in Europe still appeared to resent Norway and Norwegian society. “Not because he was jealous… but because it represented the exact opposite of Islamic ways,” Breivik conjectures.
The inability of Muslim immigrants to assimilate into European society seems to bother him, which he blames on Muslim parents not allowing their children to adopt European ways. He also asks why Muslim girls are considered ‘off-limits’ to everyone, including Muslim boys, and why Muslim men view ethnic Norwegian women as ‘whores’.
He also seems to believe that the Muslims in Europe who collect government benefits view it as a form of jizya, a medieval Islamic tax charged on non-Muslim minorities."


http://tribune.com.pk/story/216830/oslo-attacker-feared-pakistanisation-of-europe/

Riaz Haq said...

Here's an article by Mehreen Farooq and Waleed Ziad in Foreign Policy Mag detailing campaign against radicalization in Pakistan:

In a pristine, remote valley in Kashmir, far from the theaters of war, some families are abandoning their religious and cultural traditions in favor of extremist ideologies. The trend began after the 2005 earthquake, when several Islamist organizations - notably Jamaat ud-Dawa (JuD) - came to the forefront, providing food, shelter and health supplies to devastated communities. A village elder lamented, "Many of us were impressed by their sophisticated ambulance services, and families willingly joined in their relief efforts." Most of these families had no idea that JuD was in fact a front for the banned militant organization, Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Pakistanis, particularly in such remote areas, require tools to recognize extremist ideologies and terrorist organizations so that they can create counter-movements within their own communities. We travelled throughout Northern Punjab and the Hazara region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to learn how certain grassroots organizations have designed effective awareness campaigns within a religious paradigm that are palatable even to the at-risk population.

We began with the leaders of Pakistan's moderate religious networks. Since 9/11, dozens of religious scholars have issued public statements and fatwas against terrorism. Dr. Raghib Naeemi -- son of Dr. Sarfraz Naeemi who was killed in 2009 after he publically denounced terrorist activities as un-Islamic -- appears regularly on TV to promote peace and social cohesion.
---------
150 miles south, in a village near Bhera, a father learned that his son was being brainwashed by a fundamentalist community member to believe that he would enter paradise if he became a suicide bomber. The father, supported by the Dar ul-Uloom community, rescued the children by publically exposing the radical mullah. He challenged the mullah: "After sending my child to paradise, why don't you send your own son to join him so that mine won't be lonely?"

Even some segments of the population that had been involved in militancy are now condemning extremism. Irfan, a former "toll collector" for a militant outfit along the Pakistan-Afghanistan Durand Line explained, "After the Taliban bombed the shrine of the Rahman Baba, the great Pashtun poet-saint, I realized that militants are destroying our country." Now as a taxi driver, Irfan makes it a point to lambast the Taliban in conversations with all of his passengers.


http://afpak.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/10/21/pakistans_most_powerful_weapon

Riaz Haq said...

Here are excerpts of an Op Ed in The Atlantic titled "The White Savior Industrial Complex"
By Teju Cole:

What Africa needs more pressingly than Kony's indictment is more equitable civil society, more robust democracy, and a fairer system of justice.
--------------
1- From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex.

Teju Cole @tejucole

2- The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening.

Teju Cole @tejucole

3- The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.

Teju Cole @tejucole

4- This world exists simply to satisfy the needs—including, importantly, the sentimental needs—of white people and Oprah.

5- The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.

Teju Cole @tejucole

6- Feverish worry over that awful African warlord. But close to 1.5 million Iraqis died from an American war of choice. Worry about that.

Teju Cole @tejucole

7- I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly.

These tweets were retweeted, forwarded, and widely shared by readers. They migrated beyond Twitter to blogs, Tumblr, Facebook, and other sites; I'm told they generated fierce arguments. As the days went by, the tweets were reproduced in their entirety on the websites of the Atlantic and the New York Times, and they showed up on German, Spanish, and Portuguese sites. A friend emailed to tell me that the fourth tweet, which cheekily name-checks Oprah, was mentioned on Fox television.

These sentences of mine, written without much premeditation, had touched a nerve. I heard back from many people who were grateful to have read them. I heard back from many others who were disappointed or furious. Many people, too many to count, called me a racist. One person likened me to the Mau Mau. The Atlantic writer who'd reproduced them, while agreeing with my broader points, described the language in which they were expressed as "resentment."

This weekend, I listened to a radio interview given by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof. Kristof is best known for his regular column in the New York Times in which he often gives accounts of his activism or that of other Westerners. When I saw the Kony 2012 video, I found it tonally similar to Kristof's approach, and that was why I mentioned him in the first of my seven tweets.

Those tweets, though unpremeditated, were intentional in their irony and seriousness. I did not write them to score cheap points, much less to hurt anyone's feelings. I believed that a certain kind of language is too infrequently seen in our public discourse. I am a novelist. I traffic in subtleties, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point. ....


http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrial-complex/254843/

Riaz Haq said...

Here are some verses from a Holy Book:

1. “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

2. “If your very own brother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you love, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying, ‘Let us go and worship other gods’ . . . do not yield to him or listen to him. Show him no pity. Do not spare him or shield him. You must certainly put him to death.”

3. “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.”

Q. Are these from the Quran or the Bible?

A. From the Bible. Matthew 10:34, Deuteronomy 13:6-9, Numbers 31:17-18

Riaz Haq said...

Here's an excerpt of Pervez Hoodbhoy's Op Ed on popes and caliphs as published in Express Tribune:

A consensus at electing popes hasn’t always been that easy. History: Pope Gregory X established the Papal Conclave in 1274 after it took the cardinals nearly three years to choose him as the successor to Pope Clement IV. Locking the cardinals in a meeting and gradually decreasing their food rations was seen as good way to expedite agreement on a new pope. Three voting cardinals died during the process. Such is life.

What enables the quick consensus on electing popes in modern times? Simple: the pope’s role has become largely ceremonial since 1536. No head of state need obey his orders. For Catholics, he is an icon of piety and chastity standing above the sordid politics of the world. While they are expected to live and breed according to the dictates of the Church, they do not consider them to be infallible any more. Today, increasing numbers of Catholics are moving away from the Church because of its stand on birth control and divorce. Nevertheless, though with much lessened powers, the new pope speaks for 1.2 billion Catholics.

Who should speak for the 1.5 billion Muslims today? This question is difficult because the Islamic world has been without a caliph ever since Kemal Ataturk eliminated the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924. Earlier, a caliphate had been the norm. Today, several Muslim groups are marketing the idea that restoring ancient glories is contingent upon reviving the caliphate. But this is a prescription for fratricidal conflict.

The problem is that the caliph is generally understood to be both the spiritual as well as temporal leader. The Egyptian scholar, Taha Hussein, was unusual in suggesting that Islam permits the two aspects to be separated. This strongly conflicts with the views of Maulana Abul Ala Maududi or Sayyid Qutb and those who have been influenced by them. In 2001, Osama bin Laden called upon Muslims to “establish the righteous caliphate of our ummah”, a man who would lead and organise the ummah. A Sunni, he would enforce a single Sharia. The bewilderingly many extant sects and schools of thought would have to vanish, either by persuasion or by coercion. Since Shias obviously cannot be persuaded, they (and others) would have to be subdued.

More significantly, the caliph would be the commander-in-chief of all Muslim forces belonging to an Islamic superstate that would supercede the authority of Muslim national states. He would authorise jihad, both defensive and offensive, in forms ranging from actual combat to space wars, cyber jihad, economic sanctions, oil boycotts, making treaties, and dealing with the World Bank and the IMF. Pakistan’s nuclear weapons would be at the caliph’s command. So would oil from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Gulf. If any Muslim country defied his orders, waging war would be an option.
-----------
Today, a global caliphate can only be created through violence. The Hizbut Tahrir, which seeks this goal, sees mutinies and insurrections as the solution. Its website calls upon Pakistan’s armed forces to rise against its leadership. Brigadier Ali Khan and his colleagues will surely not be the last officers convicted of sedition.

It is a hard enough question, answerable only by God, to judge who is truly a pious Christian or Muslim. But when the power to make war also depends on the answer, it becomes impossibly difficult. So, the 13th century cardinals locked up by Pope Gregory X would have starved to death rather than arrive at an agreement! Attempting to elect a caliph today would pit Muslim against Muslim in bloody conflict. Although there is zero chance of the caliphate’s revival, this goal nevertheless looms large in the consciousness of those committed to seizing state power and to fundamentally transforming the societies they take over.


http://tribune.com.pk/story/524854/on-choosing-popes-and-caliphs/

Riaz Haq said...

Here's an excerpt of WSJ review of "Islam Without Extremes" by Turkish author Mustafa Akyol:

Mr. Akyol, a pious Muslim and a classical liberal, begins his case by proposing a serious rereading of the Quran. "The idea of freedom—in the theological, political, or economic sense—was not unknown in classical Islamdom, as some have claimed," Mr. Akyol writes. He notes that the Quran, compiled in the seventh century, broke with the traditions of its time and place—by mandating protections for property, appealing to the judgment of reason and promoting the idea of a rule of law (as opposed to rule by the whim of despots). Taking inspiration from the separation of church and state in the American constitution, Mr. Akyol suggests that a liberal democracy can be built on Muslim soil as long as neither Islamists nor secular strongmen are allowed to mix religion with politics.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424053111903554904576458563543798724

Riaz Haq said...

Hadith-based laws unnecessary, says Dr Mahathir. "We've rejected the Quran in favor of the Hadith" https://shar.es/1rbnfY #Malaysia,#Islam

In a statement that is likely to invite brickbats from several quarters, Mahathir said injunctions from the Hadith were merely guidance and not meant to be enforced as law.
“The teachings, or the performance, or the traditions of the Prophet come after he had been given the message of Allah, which is recorded in the Quran,” he said.
“Between the two, it is obviously the Quran that is superior.”
Mahathir pointed out that stoning to death for fornication is not called for in the Quran, but only in the Hadith, which mentions the enforcement of such punishment on two occasions.
“Allah is merciful and compassionate,” he said. “One who is merciful and compassionate would not enjoy stoning people to death.”
Mahathir stressed that any Islamic law would have to be just. If it were unjust, he said, it would not be Islamic.
Thus, he said, he disagreed with the law that requires a woman to produce four witnesses to back her claim of being raped.
He said deviations from the message of the Quran had led to deviant behaviour among Muslims. He cited atrocities committed by organisations like the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria as well as the recent conviction of a Malaysian student in London for possession of child pornography.
“We used to have great scientists and mathematicians, but now our mathematicians are downloading 30,000 pornography images,” he lamented. (The convicted student was pursuing a mathematics degree.)
Mahathir also expressed his disagreement with the practice of turning fatwas into law.
Fatwas, he said, were merely opinions, and the laws derived from them were sometimes impractical and unnecessary. He gave the example of old fatwas that prohibited the use of light bulbs and motorised vehicles because they were invented by “infidels”.
“There’s no necessity to Islamise everything,” he said. “Of course, there are things that should be abstained from as they are forbidden in Islam, but there’s no reason to give unnecessary fatwas to Islamise them.”

Riaz Haq said...

#Islamic scripture is not the problem, #US should not fund dissident #Muslims like Ayan Hirsi Ali. #Islamophobia http://brook.gs/1BsSS53

Some Muslims have cited Scripture to justify violence, and some have cited it to justify peace. If Scripture is a constant but the behavior of its followers is not, then one should look elsewhere to explain why some Muslims engage in terrorism. And if Islamic Scripture doesn’t automatically lead to terrorism, then one should not expect the reform of Islam to end terrorism. Indeed, even the ultratextualist followers of the self-proclaimed Islamic State ignore Scripture that is inconvenient for their brutal brand of insurgency.

Consider the Gospels, Scriptures that advocate far less violence than the Koran or the Hebrew Bible. Jesus taught his followers to turn the other cheek. Yet the crusaders murdered thousands in their rampage across the Middle East, and U.S. President George W. Bush, a devout Christian, invaded Iraq without military provocation. Readers may object to these examples, arguing that other factors were at play—but that is exactly the point: Christian Scripture doesn’t always determine the behavior of its followers, and the same goes for Islamic Scripture.

REFORM, MEET REALITY

The faulty causal chain is the biggest flaw in Hirsi Ali’s essay, but there are others. Even assuming that the liberal reform of Islam would help reduce terrorism—and indeed, few outsiders would complain if the majority of Muslims decided that some of the harsher passages of their Scriptures weren’t relevant to modern life—the picture Hirsi Ali paints of lonely Muslim dissidents trying to start an Islamic reformation is not accurate. A liberal reformation of Islam has been ongoing for two centuries; the problem is that it has faced some stiff competition.

As with the Protestant Reformation, there is a conservative reform movement in Islam today that competes with the liberal reformers. Foremost among the conservatives are the ultraconservative Salafists—Islam’s Puritans. They want to scrape off all the foreign accretions, such as Greek philosophy, that have attached themselves to Islam over the centuries and go back to a supposedly pure version of the faith. One big reason the conservative reformers have won the day so far is that some governments, especially the wealthy states of the Persian Gulf, have sponsored the ultraconservatives. Because rich Muslim governments have put their thumbs on the conservative side of the scale, Hirsi Ali wants the United States and other Western countries to do the same on the liberal side.

There are many problems with this approach. For one thing, the United States has laws against promoting one set of religious beliefs over another. Before 9/11, the U.S. government refused to fund programs that gave preference to one sect over others or a more tolerant version of a faith over a less tolerant form, although there was some wiggle room for secular programs, such as science education, overseen by religious institutions. Better, officials argued, to promote human rights and freedoms without the trappings of religion. But after the attacks, the U.S. government began to make a few exceptions to this long-standing tradition by funding some Muslim institutions overseas to promote pluralistic versions of Islam. For example, the U.S. Agency for International Development mission in Indonesia funded a group that put pluralistic messages in religious sermons delivered by women and sponsored a radio show about religion and tolerance. That’s not quite what Hirsi Ali wants—the programs didn’t repudiate parts of Islamic Scripture or seek to reform the religion wholesale—but it’s close.

http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/markaz/posts/2015/06/16-islamic-scripture-not-problem-mccants?cid=00900015020089101US0001-06191

Riaz Haq said...

Shadi Hamid: Will #Muslims follow western trajectory: Reformation, Enlightenment, Secularism, Liberal Democracy?

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/06/the-meaningless-politics-of-liberal-democracies/486089/

Perhaps his most provocative claim is this: History will not necessarily favor the secular, liberal democracies of the West. Hamid does not believe all countries will inevitably follow a path from revolution to rational Enlightenment and non-theocratic government, nor should they. There are some basic arguments for this: Islam is growing, and in some majority-Muslim nations, huge numbers of citizens believe Islamic law should be upheld by the state. But Hamid also thinks there’s something lacking in Western democracies, that there’s a sense of overarching meaninglessness in political and cultural life in these countries that can help explain why a young Muslim who grew up in the U.K. might feel drawn to martyrdom, for example. This is not a dismissal of democracy, nor does it comprehensively explain the phenomenon of jihadism. Rather, it’s a note of skepticism about the promise of secular democracy—and the wisdom of pushing that model on other cultures and regions.

------

Green: You open the book by asking about this inscrutable yearning for violence that seems to be felt among a small minority of Muslim extremists. What do you make of this yearning?

Hamid: On a basic level, violence offers meaning. And that’s what makes it scary. In the broader sweep of history, mass violence and mass killing is actually the norm. It’s only in recent centuries that states and institutions have tried to persuade people to avoid such practices.

That also reminds us that when institutions and social norms are weakened, those base sentiments can rise up again quite easily. And that’s what I saw.

-----

Green: You also frame violence as a way of grappling with theodicy, or the problem of evil. How does this play out in the Islamic tradition?

Hamid: That is the question many Muslims have been asking not just recently, but for centuries, ever since the fall of the various caliphates and empires: Why is God doing this? Why is God permitting this fall from grace? The Muslim narrative you hear a lot is that when Muslims were good, God rewarded them with success and territory. When Muslims went astray, then perhaps God decided to send them a message to encourage them to return to the straight path.


A question I get a lot is, “Wait, ok, is Islam violent? Does the Quran endorse violence?” I find this to be a very weird question. Of course there is violence in the Quran. Muhammad was a state builder, and to build a state you need to capture territory. The only way to capture territory is to wrest it from the control of others, and that requires violence. This isn’t about Islam or the Prophet Muhammad; state building has historically always been a violent process.

Green: On that point, you observe that the state-building impulses of the Islamic State actually make it much more terrifying than other groups. Why?

Hamid: ISIS has gone well beyond the al-Qaeda model of terrorism and destruction. Of course, ISIS does that, too, but it attempts to build something in the place of what it has destroyed. It has an unusually pronounced interest in governance. And they are not just making things up as they go along. There does seem to be a method to the madness; they are drawing from certain strains of Islamic history and tradition. They are perverting them, I would argue, and distorting them, but it is not as if they are just making it up out of the air.

I

Riaz Haq said...

Liberal #Islam is not the answer to #ISIS. #secularism #liberalism http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/philosophy/liberal-islam-is-not-the-answer-to-islamic-state … via @prospect_uk

"Forged in the age of empire in the 19th-century, one of the central paradoxes of liberalism has been its propagation of universal concepts in the service of particular interests. In the 19th-century Muslim world, these interests were defined largely by British imperial concerns. Today, liberal values are defined more broadly as stemming from a shared western heritage reaching back for legitimisation, as the British colonialists often did, to antiquity. Classical economic liberalism has recently even been prescribed as a panacea for both the Muslim world’s civilisational underdevelopment and its problems with extremism by the American scholar and policy adviser Vali Nasr and the Turkish journalist Mustafa Akyol

For Nasr and Akyol, Muslim liberalism is a happy coincidence between the values of Islam and those of the west. But such Muslim liberals grasp for connections between Islam and the west through a modern ideology which by its nature has no provenance in the Muslim world. In this way, liberal Islam’s relationship to the west becomes parasitic rather than based on any elective affinity. This is why the more that Muslim liberals aim for synthesis, the more their faith is seemingly diminished.


Liberal Islam’s third problem is its preoccupation with the idea of defining a “true” Islam that excludes or even labels as heretics or non-Muslims those who don’t adhere to this perceived consensus.

Perhaps the most popular response to Islamist extremism has been to reiterate the idea that the majority of Muslims are moderate. The problem here is not that most Muslims are not moderate (they are) but that projects encouraging Muslim moderation can be used against minorities, including within Islam, because they involve a process of “orientalising” others. This has been evident in the British government’s fostering of “moderate” Islam through its Prevent policy agenda for over a decade and its promotion of Britishness in more recent years—strategies which arguably have both divided Muslims and alienated them from wider society, especially those with conservative beliefs.

This mode of “othering” in the name of moderation also conflates extremism with heresy. So similar arguments about being beyond the pale of “mainstream” Islam can be applied to both terrorists like IS and those on the margins of Islam who may disagree with established forms of religious authority, or simply represent the wrong sect. It also ties together the will to marginalise dissent to the need for more authoritarian forms of leadership: witness the strange sight of western governments bolstering traditional Islamic centres of authority such as Al Azhar in Egypt—an institution whose legitimacy has been sustained by authoritarian governments."

Riaz Haq said...

#Trump take part in a debate in #SaudiArabia about how to promote "#moderate #Islam".

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/05/19/trump-once-denounced-saudi-arabia-as-extremist-now-hes-heading-there-to-promote-moderate-islam/?utm_term=.82cbb4719eda

During his time in the Saudi kingdom, Trump is planning to lead an address to around 50 Muslim leaders and take part in a debate about how to promote moderate Islam.

According to White House national security adviser H.R. McMaster, the president will “deliver an inspiring but direct speech on the need to confront radical ideology” at the newly inaugurated Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology; one reported possibility is that Trump may propose an “Arab NATO,” in part to help fight terrorism.

The setting for the speech is key. Saudi Arabia is not only a key U.S. ally in the Middle East and a powerful force in the Arab world, but the birthplace of Islam's prophet Muhammad. The Saudi leader, King Salman, is officially referred to as the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques — a reference to the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca and Masjid al-Nabawi in Medina.

However, the location may also rankle some. The Saudi kingdom does not have a reputation as a land of religious moderation. Instead, Saudi Arabia and the al-Saud royal family have been accused of aiding and abetting religious extremism that can feed terrorism — not only granting conservative clerics vast say over daily life within Saudi Arabia, but actively exporting their views abroad.

“It's fair to say the Saudi government has spent billions of dollars over several decades to promote its ultraconservative version of Islam, which calls for hating infidels and, sometimes, jihad against them,” says Will McCants, director of the Brookings Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World.

Riaz Haq said...

Military Metaphysics and the Native Informer

by Muhammad Idris Ahmad

http://www.palestinechronicle.com/military-metaphysics-and-the-native-informer/

So who invited Nawaz and the Quilliam Foundation to Islamabad? Pervez Hoodbhoy, of course—to ‘reopen minds’, you see. [2]
Since Nawaz came with a foreign office security detail in tow (suits and body armour courtesy of the British taxpayer), Hoodbhoy can’t claim innocence about the purpose of the trip. At least the BBC’s Tim Whewell was forthright: ‘Backed by the British government,’ he intoned dramatically, ‘Maajid Nawaz is heading for the frontline in the war on terror to fight the ideas he once promoted’. Whewell was soon faithfully reproducing the Hoodbhoy meme, telling viewers how more Pakistani children were forsaking secular education for the madrassas. The clueless reporter took viewers down a madrassa corridor where he found ‘a sign of radicalization before they [the students] have left—Saudi-style head-dresses’! In his interview with Whewell, Hoodbhoy spoke about the growing assertion among students of their Islamic identity and then sagely mused: ‘something…something has happened…something very important, something fundamental has changed’.
Hoodbhoy however is no mere tool; he is equally adept at taking his own message to foreign capitals. After attending his lecture at the Middle East Institute in Washington, a senior IPS journalist told me he was astounded by the extreme hawkishness of Hoodbhoy’s views. Counterpunch readers could not have missed the fact that Hoodbhoy was rather selective in choosing which war to condemn; he had nothing to say about Afghanistan, a war he supports. He speaks passionately about all the horrors that according to him afflict Pakistan today, but makes no mention whence they arise. In fact, for the past several years, Hoodbhoy has been advocating vigorous military action to quell the frontier unrest. During the years when the military was devastating the tribal belt using airpower and artillery, if Hoodbhoy had any objection at all, it was that Musharraf was not going far enough. He then turned to Western audiences, with alarmist stories about the looming Islamist threat to enlist support for his domestic crusade. He didn’t shrink from maligning even his own colleagues, branding some the ‘urban Taliban’: ‘There are indeed more than a few scientists and engineers in the nuclear establishment with extreme religious views’, he told Counterpunch readers last July.
Under US pressure in May 2009 the Pakistani military launched a major incursion into Swat precipitating the largest refugee crisis since Rwanda. In his inimitable style Hoodbhoy described the incident that triggered this utterly avoidable human tragedy as ‘a miracle of sorts’. He denounced as ‘apologists for the Taliban’ all who urged caution, chief among them ‘opinion-forming local TV anchors’, and lamented that the ‘government’s massive propaganda apparatus lay rusting’. Anyone who suggested that the US presence next door or the indiscriminate drone attacks as possible destabilizing factors he accused of harbouring ‘festering resentments which [produce] a paranoid mindset that blames Washington for all of Pakistan’s ills’. At a time when most agreed that the problems were political and needed to be resolved accordingly, Hoodbhoy was gung-ho, advising the state to use ‘all possible means, including adequate military force’. In 2008 when eleven Pakistani soldiers were killed by US forces at a border post,

Riaz Haq said...

Native Orientalists at the Daily Times

M. Shahid Alam

https://pulsemedia.org/2009/11/30/native-orientalists-at-the-daily-times/


“The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the foremost minds of the ruled class, the more stable and dangerous becomes its rule.”
–Karl Marx

A few days back, I received a ‘Dear friends’ email from Mr. Najam Sethi, ex editor-in-chief of Daily Times, Pakistan, announcing that he, together with several of his colleagues, had resigned from their positions in the newspaper.

In his email, Mr. Sethi thanked his ‘friends’ for their “support and encouragement…in making Daily Times a ‘new voice for a new Pakistan.’” Wistfully, he added, “I hope it will be able to live up to your expectations and mine in time to come.”

I am not sure why Mr. Sethi had chosen me for this dubious honor. Certainly, I did not deserve it. I could not count myself among his ‘friends’ who had given “support and encouragement” to the mission that DT had chosen for itself in Pakistan’s media and politics.

Contrary to its slogan, it was never DT’s mission to be a ‘new voice for a new Pakistan.’ The DT had dredged its voice from the colonial past; it had only altered its pitch and delivery to serve the new US-Zionist overlords. Many of the writers for DT aspire to the office of the native informers of the colonial era. They are heirs to the brown Sahibs, home-grown Orientalists, who see their own world (if it is theirs in any meaningful sense) through the lens created for them by their spiritual mentors, the Western Orientalists.


Pakistanis had failed to seize sovereign control over their country at its birth. In August 1947, the departing British had few worries about losing their colonial assets in Pakistan. They were quite confident that the brown Sahibs, who were succeeding them, would not fail in their duty to protect these assets. Within a few years, these brown Sahibs had strapped the new country to the wheels of the neocolonial order. Without effective resistance from below – from intellectuals, workers, students and peasants – these neocolonial managers have been free to cannibalize their own people as long as they could also keep their masters happy.

This is not a cri de coeur – only a diagnosis of Pakistan’s misery. It is a misery that only Pakistanis can remedy once they make up their minds to terminate the system that has castrated them for more than six decades. The best time to do this was in the first decades after their country’s birth, when the Western imperialist grip was still weak, and, with courage and organization, Pakistanis could have set their newly free country on the course of irreversible independence.

Grievously, Pakistanis had failed at this task. Pakistan’s elites produced few men and women of conscience, who could transcend their class origins to mobilize workers and peasants to fight for their rights. More regrettably, Pakistan’s emerging middle classes have been too busy aping the brown Sahibs, stepping over each other to join the ranks of the corrupt elites. As a result, Pakistan’s elites have grown more predatory, refusing to establish the rule of law in any sphere of society.

Ironically, the enormous success of Edward Said’s Orientalism, his devastating critiquing of the West’s hegemonic discourse on the ‘Orient,’ has deflected attention from the recrudescence of a native Orientalism in much of the Periphery in the last few decades. Its victory in Pakistan is nearly complete, where it has been led by the likes of Ahmad Rashid, Pervez Hoodbhoy, Najam Sethi, Khaled Ahmad, Irfan Hussain, Husain Haqqani, and P. J. Mir. Not a very illustrious lot, but they are the minions of Western embassies and Western-financed NGOs in Pakistan.

Riaz Haq said...

Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (review)
Kanishka Chowdhury

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/243354

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Reviewed by
Kanishka Chowdhury
Gauri Viswanathan. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia UP, 1989. 206 pp. $32.50.
In his Prison Notebooks Antonio Gramsci argues that a class can exercise its power not merely by the use of military force but by an institutionalized system of moral and intellectual leadership that propogates certain ideas and beliefs. For Gramsci "cultural hegemony" is maintained through the consent of the dominated class which assures the intellectual and material supremacy of the ruling class. In Masks of Conquest, Gauri Viswanathan uses this Gramscian model of hegemony to analyze the relationship between British political and commercial interests and the establishment of English Literature as a discipline in India. [End Page 331]
Early in the book Viswanathan clearly states that the literary curriculum was introduced in India not to demonstrate the superiority of English culture but to "mask" the economic exploitation of the colonized. The propagation of English literature among the "natives," from the vigorous attempts by the secularized government schools to the more uneasy attempts by the Christian missionary schools, was ultimately carried out to ensure the authority of the British government and to create a stable state in which British mercantile and military interests could flourish.
In the last of six central chapters, however, Viswanathan cleverly points out the inherent contradictions in the colonial project of creating an educated elite. Aside from developing a dissatisfied class that was denied any suitable employment opportunities, the literary curriculum highlighted the problems of a system which advocated both social control and social advancement.
Viswanathan is also careful not to oversimplify the British educational objectives in India. Using a variety of resources, she demonstrates the continual modification of the British educational goals which together created the discipline of English studies. Her attention to archival material and historical details often leads to fascinating excerpts, such as an examination paper by a certain Nobinchunder Dass of Hooghly College, Calcutta, who effusively praises the colonizer's culture. Much of Viswanathan's work, in fact, concentrates on bringing together various pamphlets, tracts, periodicals, and government sources. But Viswanathan is often inclined to be overly absorbed by her material, as in Chapter Two, "Preparatio Evangelica," where she devotes considerable space to a biographical sketch of Alexander Duff. Indeed, Viswanathan sometimes professes a greater interest in imperial representatives than in the material conditions that produced their work.

Viswanathan's brief concluding section, "Empire and the Canon," points out the dangers of reading nineteenth-century educational practice as continuous with contemporary English studies in India. Warning us about the "illusion of historical continuity," however, does not necessarily demystify the ironies of a postcolonial educational system in which an ostensibly leftist government in Bengal rigidly enforces the study of canonical English texts.
The value of Masks of Conquest finally is its important reminder that educational systems and curriculum developments must be judged in historical perspective. Viswanathan's intellectual history of British educational practice in India is both a compelling account of the relationship between power and culture and an indictment of the exploitative tendencies of ruling class interests. [End Page 332]

Riaz Haq said...

What Is a Colonized Mind?
Peter d'Errico • December 12, 2011

https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/news/opinions/what-is-a-colonized-mind/

England was once so proud of its colonial regime that it boasted, “The sun never sets on the British empire.” Today, colonialism is a bad word. It is fashionable to say we live in a ‘post-colonial’ world.

The truth is the world continues to involve relations of domination and exploitation, under new names: “globalization,” for example.

None of this is news to observers of history and contemporary affairs. The “Occupy” movement, whatever else it may be, is evidence of widespread awareness that 1 percent of the population dominates 99 percent, an arrangement similar to colonialism except it happens within as well as between nations.

The interesting—and complicated—thing about colonialism is that it encompasses not just politics and economics, but consciousness. Critical theorists such as Frantz Fanon and Paulo Freire have pointed this out.

Fanon, a black man born in the French colony of Martinique, became a world-renowned psychoanalyst and philosopher, working in Algeria. He wrote, “For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity” [The Wretched of the Earth].

Fanon’s study of psychology and sociology led him to the further conclusion that colonized people perpetuate their condition by striving to emulate the culture and ideas of their oppressors. He wrote, “Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.”

Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator, is best known for his development of what might be called ‘liberation literacy,’ teaching literacy and political awareness together. Freire agreed with Fanon, “The oppressed want at any cost to resemble the oppressors.” He said, “the oppressed must be their own example.” Unlike Fanon, he argued that oppressors also could (and those who wanted to end colonialism must) change their own thinking: “those who authentically commit themselves to the people must re-examine themselves constantly” [Pedagogy of the Oppressed].

How do we apply these thoughts to the situation of American Indians today? The problems start with the notion that the United States is not a colonial power, or that the colonial era of American history is over. These notions are sometimes stated openly, more often concealed as assumptions behind our rhetoric.

When an Indian speaks about “our country,” what country is being talked about? Is it an Indigenous Nation or the United States? When an Indian refers to “my President,” which president is being discussed, the president of an Indigenous Nation or the president of the U.S.? These kinds of statements need to be examined to determine whether the speaker is asserting something that supports or undermines consciousness of Indigenous sovereignty.

----
Patrice Lumumba, the first indigenous leader of the Republic of the Congo, called for mental decolonization in his speech to the 1960 Pan-African Congress, saying we have to “rediscover our most intimate selves and rid ourselves of mental attitudes and complexes and habits that colonization … trapped us in for centuries.” Lumumba thought it possible to work together with the former Belgian oppressors; for their part, they saw him as an enemy and facilitated his assassination.

We might say that collaboration among Indian nations and the U.S. is the best of both worlds. Even here, however, we must be careful. To ‘collaborate,’ in its root meaning, is to ‘work together’; but there is also a different meaning: ‘traitorous cooperation with the enemy.’ Which of these we mean—and which we engage in—depends on whether our minds are decolonized. ‘Working together’ requires all participants to work on themselves, their thinking, assumptions, perspectives, beliefs, and habits of mind. Decolonization is personal and political.

Riaz Haq said...

#Europe's century old mistake: Shifting #Islam's theological-political power from Ottoman #Turkey to #SaudiArabia

https://www.economist.com/blogs/erasmus/2016/07/ottoman-caliphs

EVERY time a European city is shaken by an act of mass violence, the continent's heavy-weight newspapers host agonised debates over what has gone wrong. In particular, debaters often ask, should European states have responded differently to the emergence of large, discontented Muslim minorities, either by accommodating cultural difference more generously or (as some advocate) by suppressing it? Even when it becomes clear that Islam was not really a factor at all (as seems to be the case with last week's killing spree by a maladjusted young man in Munich) the discussions go on.

One of America's leading authorities on European Islam has made a rather nuanced and unusual contribution to this conversation. Writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in response to a column asserting that "terrorism has a lot to do with Islam", Jonathan Laurence argues (link to English translation) that the present-day pathologies of European Islam are a kind of aftershock from a century-old mistake. Or rather, of a short-sighted policy that went into higher gear almost exactly 100 years ago. In the summer of 1916, the British government and its war allies began fomenting an Arab revolt against the political and above all, spiritual authority of the Ottomans. This brought about the British-led capture of Jerusalem and the collapse of Ottoman dominion over Islam's holiest places, whether in the Levant or Arabia. As an alternative to Ottoman rule over the Arabs, the British initially backed the Hashemite dynasty which still reigns over Jordan; but the ultimate beneficiary was the royal house of Saud which took over Mecca and Medina in 1924.

In the view of Mr Laurence, a professor at Boston College, this brought to an end a period of several decades in which the caliphate (a spiritual role which the Ottomans combined, until 1922, with the worldly rank of sultan) had a generally benign effect on global Islam. Not only within the Ottoman realm but far beyond it, the caliphate formed the apex of a international network of teachers, preachers and judges. As was shown by Halil Inalcιk, an Ottoman historian who died this week aged 100, the sultan-caliphs' real power varied a lot over time; some managed to control the ulema or religious scholars, others didn't. But the institution's global spiritual role was especially important in the late 19th century and early 20th century, ultimately embracing more than 100m Muslims living under British rule (in South Asia) and under Dutch rule (in modern Indonesia). As Mustafa Akyol, a Turkish writer on religion, points out, the caliph's sway over Muslims in the Asia-Pacific region had benign consequences for the United States; Abdulhamid II (pictured), the last long-reigning sultan, helped persuade Filipino Muslims to accept American power over their archipelago. (Others have darker memories of that sovereign; Armenians hold him responsible for killing tens of thousands of their kin in 1895.)
Yet precisely because the Ottoman caliphate was so attractive to some of their subjects, European powers worked hard to undermine it. From at least 1870, British diplomacy tried to shift the centre of gravity in global Islam from the Turks to the Arabs. The Dutch tried to stop their Muslim subjects deferring to the caliph in their public prayers. With somewhat more success, the French promoted alternative centres of spiritual authority among the Muslims they ruled in Algeria and Morocco. As long as the Ottomans retained control of Libya (ie, until 1912), the caliphate kept some sway in North Africa. But when Turkey's new secular nationalist rulers finally abolished the office of caliph in 1924, their job was made easier by the fact that European powers had been sabotaging the sacred office for decades.